The Brief
Literary publishers occupy a peculiar corner of the brand landscape. Their identity must signal authority without pomposity, tradition without staleness. The Folio Press had operated for 22 years on a wordmark drawn in-house in 2002 — a wordmark that had served them well but had begun to feel like a coat three sizes too small.
"We wanted something that felt like it had always been there — like it was uncovered, not designed."
The brief was to establish an identity that the press could grow into over the next twenty years. Not a rebrand — a foundation.
The Approach
We started with a single letterform — the capital F, in Cormorant Garamond at 300 weight. The decision to use a variable-weight typeface was deliberate: it let us tune the personality from authoritative (heavy) to literary-light (thin) across different applications without introducing a second typeface.
The editorial grid came from the press's backlist, not from design convention. We measured forty of their best-known books, extracted the proportional logic that united them, and used it as the structural basis for the new templates. The result feels like a continuation of the press's history because it literally is.